hans wrote:
Doug Haluza schrieb:
I was at the OLC symposium in Gersfeld/Roehn Germany yesterday, and had
a chance to talk to some of the developers on the OLC team. The old OLC
sysyem, though functional, was a technological dead end. It was one
large C-language program, written by one person, without documentation.
So it was not possible to make changes to one part of the program,
without affecting other parts. It was also not possible to support this
properly with a distributed team of volunteers.

I can assure you that some of the information you got there was not
correct.

Well, I was speaking in English to native German speakers, so something
may have been lost in translation, but I think it was substantially
correct. Obviously there is some history here that I am not aware of,
though.

The old software was a C-code written by myself and JK, plus a
mySql-database, which stored all the information, plus lots of php-code
written by CH, AR for all the displays and scorings and a third person
for the BHC.

Impossible to maintain and dead end? Yes, if you remove the two lead
persons within 6 month form the project.

I did not say it was impossible to maintain--in fact I said it was
functional. I did say it was not possible to support properly with a
distributed team. Many things can be done, but that does not mean they
should be done. If you are working with a distributed team, especially
an all-volunteer team, a modular architecture allows you to parse out
tasks, and decouple the separate activities.

Have a look at sis-at.streckenflug.at to see the dead end of this
technology ;-)
The team for sis-at are CH, one new person, and myself and JK helping us
out with the maps and baros.

And we do distributed development, like in the old days of the OLC, now
only between Vienna and Munich, in the days of the OLC it was Munich,
Vienna, Constance, and Hamburg.

It is possible to do distributed development on a monolithic block of
code, but it is not possible to work both simultaneously and
independently as you can with a modular architecture. Obviously the
modular architecture of OLC 2.0 will help the OLC developers to explore
new possibilities, once the basic functions are stable.

Doug Haluza
SSA-OLC Admin